Friday, 16 September 2011

"I Don't Know How She Does It" (Scotsman 16/09/11)

The heroine of Allison Pearson’s bestseller is here forcibly relocated to a USA of bake sales, playdates and dismally conventional mainstream entertainments. Über-mother Kate (Parker) juggles childcare and career with the bizarre pursuit of mom-ranking. She surpasses single mum Christina Hendricks, because she has both hubby Kinnear and alpha-male banker Brosnan hot for her; she obviously has her childless careerist colleagues beat; and she outdoes any gym-toned “momster”, because she looks naturally fabulous, and isn’t, allegedly, a total bee-yotch. To the age-old question of what women want, the film bluntly responds: a medal, dammit.

Insistently slick direction establishes the now-standard overlit universe in which a heroine might contrive to send risqué IMs to unintended recipients, or have to postpone building her daughter a snowman just to imbue a project bereft of drama with another phony crisis. Any of Pearson’s nuances have long been processed out; the remaining propagation propaganda is continually undermined by the fact Parker, struggling to recapture her pre-Carrie warmth, holds her onscreen offspring as though expecting somebody to switch in a Prada clutch at any second. Even with mother-and-baby screenings, I don’t know why you’d bother.

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About Me

Mike was born in Warwickshire in 1978. He has written on film for The Scotsman since 2002, for The Telegraph since 2003, for The Guardian since 2012, and for the Reader's Digest since 2016. In the intervening years, he has appeared on Radio 4's "Today" programme and - with a degree of randomness befitting the man - BBC2's "Working Lunch". He has also contributed to the home-viewing reference guide "The DVD Stack" (Canongate, 2006; second edition 2007) and Halliwell's "The Movies That Matter" (HarperCollins, 2008).